Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter

"Nice game, but that's it..."

First of all, I want to say that I really looked forward to get this. I played X-Wing and Tie-Fighter on PC so many times, that I really wanted to like this game. But sadly, I couldn't.

The presentation is nice. You get CG movies inbetween levels. You got some really nice unlockables (especially ''a day at lucasarts''), but the game is just BORING and WAY TOO SHORT.

LucasArts, what did you do. X-Wing/Tie-Fighter had so many missions and you needed weeks to fly through all of them. Jedi Starfighter has something around 12. I played through this game within about 5 hours (!) and some missions (especially that bio-weapon-defend-the-innocent-civilians) mission was making me mad. The target-selection is awful. You need 3 hours to track onto one target and sometimes you will lose a mission (...and have to REPLY it from scratch...) just because of that.

The graphics are good on the other side, especially the explosions. Anyway, I want 20 missions more. I also found a bug that crashed the game after playing mission 9 and it occured 5 times (!) in a row. You need around 15 minutes to play through that mission and it keeps crashing before you are able to save. I played through it later on EASY mode and skipped 1 bonus mission goal, that strangely fixed it and I was able to save. Where is your QA LucasArts?

I bought this game one day and sold it on the next day on eBay. Not much fun. Especially the crash was making me mad. If I wanted crashes, I would buy games for PC.

Also the indicators on the mission map are irritating. It would have been better, if the lights would go on PER mode of difficulty e.g. you play through a map on EASY and EASY gets lit. Afterwards you play on HARD and HARD gets lit as well. Lucas Arts screwed it up and now only the hardest difficulty is lit. Those indicators are also broken on some prologue movies (that you select from mission map as well) and will only show MEDIUM difficulty at any case. All in all, if you want to play through the game 100%, then you will have a really irritating combination of those indicators.

Pro:
- Nice graphics, great explosions
- Sound is okay
- Typical starwars
- A day at LucasArts video
- 2 player cooperative mode

Contra:
- Long missions, one error and you have to replay
- TOO FEW MISSIONS (big big big minus)
- Some missions are plain boring
- BAD BAD CONTROL FLAWS
- Too few playtime. At least Ico was artistic and had big atmosphere
- Serious flaw after playing mission 9
- You won't want to replay most of the missions, because they are plain boring
- Most unlockable ships are a joke and you won't want to replay missions with them (exception is an unlockable X-Wing for old-school flying)

Not worth more than 10EUR/10$. If you have to pay more, don't buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/15/03, Updated 03/15/03